Telecoms.com

tag: ott

Telecoms.com caught up with TeliaSonera’s Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), Hélène Barnekow (pictured below) at the Mobile World Congress 2015 to discuss the Swedish operator’s strategy as the industry continues to change to a more software and services driven, converged market.

Catching up with Orange at the Mobile World Congress 2015, the French telco’s Group Strategy and Business development VP Daniel Gurrola told Telecoms.com the firm is on a mission to become a ‘privacy champion’ for mobile users.

Telefónica told Telecoms.com at MWC 2015 it is en route to transforming itself into a ‘digital telco’. As part of this strategy, the firm is working with Mozilla developing Firefox Hello, a browser-to-browser video communications service.

Operators see video content streaming as one of the most lucrative LTE services, according to the Telecoms.com Intelligence Annual Industry Survey 2015. However, the report results also showed telcos still see OTT service providers as a significant competitive concern.

Lycamobile, the international low-cost calling MVNO, said it will soon be releasing a communications app for its growing international customer base. Speaking to telecoms.com, CEO Chris Tooley hinted the app will be in the same vein as global OTT communications services like Whatsapp and Viber.

Operators should rethink their strategy and open their businesses more to OTTs according to Edward Tian, President and co-founder of Chinese BSS vendor AsiaInfo. In an interview with Telecoms.com he said providing OTT services as a partner offering is not fully benefiting operators, and they should adopt a more integrated approach to collaboration.

TalkTalk has confirmed the completed acquisition of video on-demand provider blinkbox Movies from Tesco, as well as its broadband subscriber base. As the UK market continues to see M&A activity towards converged, multiplay service offerings, the acquisition has expanded TalkTalk’s available range of TV and video content.

At LTE North America in Dallas this week, a panel featuring Wireless 2020, IBM, Allot Communications and US-based MVNO FreedomPop urged the service provider community to develop more flexible and tailored data bundles for customers.

Social networking giant Facebook is looking to get into the business networking and collaboration game, according to unnamed sources in an FT report. It would apparently take the form of a dedicated zone, called ‘Facebook at Work’, that would have familiar Facebook functionality, but shield your work contacts from any frivolous content posted in the personal section.

Peace broke out between telcos and OTT players on the opening day of AfricaCom 2014 in Cape Town, South Africa. The headline discussion panel attempted to tackle the longstanding issue of cooperation between mobile operators, which invest in the infrastructure to provide mobile broadband, and over-the-top (OTT) service providers, which rely on that infrastructure to serve their customers.

According to a report published by Juniper Research operators are set to lose $14 billion worth of voice and messaging traffic to OTTs such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype in 2014 alone. The report claimed operators in many markets, including the UK, Italy and Spain, have seen 60% decrease in mobile voice revenues in five years.

The European Commission Vice President, Neelie Kroes, has delivered a farewell speech to the members of the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO); in which she urged telcos to embrace over-the-top (OTT) players, and stated her dream for the European telecommunications sector after the current Commission’s tenure ends at the end of October.

Mobile comms consultancy Northstream reckons European telcos are missing out on over €2 billion in potential profits that could come from effectively partnering with Internet players generally referred to as OTTs.

The lines between network operator and OTT communications provider blurred further this week as Telefónica O2 UK partnered with cloud-based messaging and voice software developer Nexmo. Nexmo writes the underlying APIs that power the likes of Viber, Line and Kakao Talk.

Facebook has been warned it risks alienating users as it seeks to grow the reach of its Facebook Messenger app as a platform for communications, content and commerce. The company has decided to remove its mobile app’s messaging capabilities in some European markets so that users have to download Facebook Messenger instead.

Respondents to the Telecoms.com Industry Survey 2014 reaffirmed the previous year’s enthusiasm for the idea of partnership between OTT players and operators, with 92 per cent believing there is value in such collaboration. But this year the key benefits were pinpointed as improved customer retention and a competitive advantage.

Consulting and outsourcing firm Capgemini has unveiled plans to bring a white label Joyn server to market. The rich messaging server was developed in collaboration with Orange and will enable mobile operators to brand and embed their own, out of the box version of the rich messaging service onto handsets, providing consumers with an alternative to over the top (OTT) applications.

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